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letterbladeIn which I procrastinate for the sake of talking about my work, which [sarcastic] is absolutely my least favorite thing in the world to do and brings me no joy and I'm only doing it out of the good of the heart for the enlightenment of my friends list. [/sarcastic]
McTabby tempted me to attempt to list my One True Pairing. This is a delicate venture, as it first requires me to say that there is indeed only one pairing which I firmly believe in with relation to canon. I don't often actively seek it out because, even though I do like it, I don't find it as interesting as some others, precisely because it's practically canon in my mind. Yes, I'm talking about Sirius/Remus.
Oh, attack of my slash bent when it actually comes to shipping. I can appreciate het pairings, but my creative interest is almost exclusively on the slash side. Don't ask me why, it just is.
But, for your interest, to list, in no particular order, pairings that I love, adore, etcetera, but don't have the same near-canonical attitude towards that I do with Sirius/Remus, any of which might compete for OTP status:
Tom/Alastor, Harry/Draco, Lucius/Harry, Snape/Harry, Tom/Lucius, Lucius/Gilderoy, Snape/Draco.
There are probably some I've forgotten.
I also have a thing for seemingly random pairings involving Weasleys, mainly for the sake of the Weasleys (but I don't do Weasleycest, except for moments of secondary twinnage)--Bill/Sirius/Remus, Bill/Draco, Snape/Charlie, Harry-and/or-Draco/Ron, Percy/assorted evil dominant types (Tom, Lucius, Snape), Cho/Ginny, HogwartsStudent!Arthur/HogwartsStudent!Hooch, etcetera--but I haven't settled upon anything resembling a OTWP. Oh, and Fred and George are so pretending one's gay and one's straight so as to share Lee and Angelina and not tell them, and Lee and Angelina so know but are not telling them.
The point of that paragraph? Redheads are sexy.
For the sake of my sanity, I'm going to keep this solely within my current fandom (HP) and the one fandom in which I've had extensive recognition (Myst), and keep my relatively shoddy anime-fandom work and my rather old original work out of it, because I don't think anything would particularly make this list. None of my HP work may make it either, as most of it's new, fragmentary, or very short.
Best story I think I've written: Although the bunny firmly attatched to my rear wants me to say "Within These Pages...," I think I'm going to have to go for the second dark Myst vignette, "Stoneship: Salt In the Wound," since the other is so new and not even complete. I'm only partially making my own judgement here--I'm never in a state to judge my own stories so absolutely. The thing burst out of my practically fully-formed, and had me shaking in my seat as I wrote it, and its effect on my readlings seems to have been extraordinary. I'm still very fond of it, in a detatched sort of way--I've reread it so often and remember so little of what I did to write it that it seems almost like somebody else's work, and it's never quite fit into the sequence of the DMVs.
Most underrated story of mine: Probably the last of the DMVs, "Whiterock: For the Love of Spring." I did post most of the later DMVs in a terrible rush, and the seventh was usurped by our boards changing software, but I still feel like most people didn't like it quite as much as I did. Some people got it, some people didn't, and lots of people never said anything.
Most overrated story of mine: Myst: The Book of Narayan. Rambling, flirting with breaking canon, sometimes immature, sometimes melodramatic, never quite finished, but beloved by the masses (okay, small piles) of MystCommunity. Not to say I still can't see its beauty--its greatest strength is as an exploration of Narayani culture and Tamra's character, and a brief and immaturely characterized slice of the brothers during their teens (and that part did spark the DMVs, which is the only long work of mine I've managed to retain any respect for), and as I still love those things there's hope for revision and completion.
Story of mine that best demonstrates that I've grown as a writer: Oy. So many of my pieces are so bloody short there's little growth whatsoever. Maybe my as-yet-untitled Tom/Alastor piece, which is green and growing and parts of it still stun me; maybe the DMVs as a whole, as they do encompass such a range of my growth between the Book of Narayan and my current tendency for short, impressionistic pieces.
Favorite story: Either "Within These Pages...," although that may be the bunny speaking again, or the third of the DMVs, "Mechanical: Vengeance." It was intense and frightening and hallucinatory to write, spanning a huge amount of creative time for its size (months for eighteen pages), contained some of the greatest leaps in characterization that I've ever made, and words and images from it still haunt me. It's always been my favorite of the DMVs, despite the major structual problems, because of the sheer power all its scenes still hold within me. And I also have an intense fondness for two fics as yet unposted, "Slither," a ten-year-old!Tom piece that just needs some going over, and "The Philosopher's Song," a Myst story which I've yet even to finish due to not finding the time to reread the Book of Ti'ana to research such salient points as who the hell is Suahrnir anyway?
Least favorite story: The last one I revised, of course--which in this case would be Go East, a Quirrell short that I just submitted to FictionAlley. Oh, and I'm still constantly convinced that the first DMV, "Everdunes: The Prophecy," sucks.
Ah, this has come at a fortuitous time. I've only just started considering viewpoint in my own work, as I've only just started--quite unconsciously at first--experimenting with it on a regular basis.
This'll probably focus on my Harry Potter work, as my original work is outdated and minimal, my Myst work--or rather, the fandom--is probably nothing any of you know, and my work in other fandoms is either negligable or uninteresting viewpoint-wise. Plus the Harry Potter stuff, what of it I've posted, is about the only thing anybody who still reads my journal knows of.
1.) From whose POV have you written? Or, if there are too many to name, who have written most recently/famously/frequently?
In Harry Potter: Tom Riddle (1st person present and 3rd person limited past, in two different fics; the latter was when he was 10), 16-year-old Alastor Moody (1st person present), Quirrell (1st person present), Peter Pettigrew (3rd person limited past), Petunia Dursley (1st person present), Narcissa Malfoy (3rd person limited past), and Lucius Malfoy (3rd person limited past).
In Myst: Achenar (3rd person limited past), Suahrnir (3rd person limited past), Catherine (1st person present), and Atrus (1st person past and present--think journals). Also a short Escaflowne piece: Allen Schezar (3rd person limited present, and sometimes very detached). This must have been my first positive-resulted dabbling in viewpoints other than my default (which isn't character-focused), because this stuff predates the Potterfic.
I'm not going to list my work in other fandoms because it's all been in my own default narrative style, which is pretty close to third-person omniscient, so I'll get to that in number 5.
2.) How do you generally choose the viewpoint character(s) for a story?
It's usually either obvious or intuitive. I've been writing a long of character-focused one-shots recently, little two-page things caused by some character or another invading my brain for a while (Peter, Quirrell, Petunia, 10-year-old Tom); the character choice for those is obvious. The person and the tense are whatever happens, however the words appear in my mind; I've yet had to make a conscious choice in that vein with those.
Another fic I'm writing, a slash story concerning Tom Riddle and Alastor Moody during their sixth year at Hogwarts, is all in first-person present but alternates between narrators. That happened because it started with a cookie (which came of Tom invading my brain in first-person present), and then, after that, I starting hearing Moody's narration as well, so I did the obvious and decided to switch off.
Two fics I've started recently (one growing towards being a longish one-shot, the other a cookie with delusions of granduer) quite independently wound up with Malfoys as 3rd person limited. The first seemed obvious; Lucius is the center of the story, although Diary!Tom plays a major role, and having him the viewpoint allows me to simultaneously delve into his thoughts--and he's turning out to be a lot more wibbly than he appears, which has been fun--and watch Tom, unpredictable, powerful little thing that he is, from the outside. The other was the Lucius/Gilderoy cookie, which wound up being from Narcissa's viewpoint, which was spontaneous but quite entertaining. If that ever does grow into full ficness, I'll probably wind up switching between her, Lucius, and Gildie in 3rd person limited. That should be fun--seeing how each of them affects the styles of their respective sections, because they're quite different characters.
3.) First person or third person: do you have a preference? Is one easier than the other?
Preference? No. They both have their uses. I find that first is easier and more effective for shorter, intense, character-focused stuff, while third works for longer, more complex stories, with many characters or much plot. I don't think I've ever [successfully] written something with either a 1st person or a 3rd person limited [to one character] viewpoint that involved more than two characters, except for the Lucius/Gilderoy cookie, and that was only two pages and would start changing between 3rd person viewpoints if it got any longer.
4.) How do you decide which person to use in a particular story?
As in 2--focus or effect.
5.) Have you ever written second-person? Third omniscient? A story with no real viewpoint character, just an impartial eye?
Second-person: Not that I can remember. I'll probably try it someday; maybe I'll succeed, maybe not.
Third omniscient: Constantly. Until recently, at least, something which I interpret as a close cousin of third omniscient was my default narrative style, and I rarely experimented. Third person, past, constantly aware of everything that's going on both in the scene and in people's heads. Sometimes in one scene I'd limit myself to one character; sometimes I'd relay the thoughts of multiple characters in the text; sometimes I'd get very detatched. At the time, this style seemed seamless, and I'd never given much thought to PoV. When I talk about it, it sounds disjointed, and I wonder if I'd be bothered by it if I read carefully over earlier works (I'm thinking particularly of my longer Myst and Escaflowne pieces and my novel) with PoV in mind. Somehow, though, I suspect I mostly wouldn't be. Of course, I wrote it--I can realize that, even though I may have been omitting the thoughts of a character or two at any point in time, I still knew what they were. (In some of my more recent pieces, that has not been the case. The only parts of Tom's thoughts in "Within These Pages..." that I know of are the parts Lucius can observe or infer. It's a strange feeling, to somebody used to a third omniscient awareness of her scene, to write that way, but it's been working.) Somebody else might not know that, and thus it would appear that I was bouncing between third limited and third omniscient, and sometimes even third impartial.
Impartial eye: Again, not that I can remember. Sometimes moments of omniscient come close to it--when I decide to pull back the focus, as it were, particularly in moments after great stress. There was also an Escaflowne story that was half impartial and half inside the head of one of the characters. Telepathic impartial eye, maybe? Even the flashbacks seemed rather distant.
6.) What's the largest number of viewpoints you've ever used in a story?
That would probably have been The Scorpion in the Mirror, a tormented slashy smutty Escaflowne epic which I may well never complete, but which, if memory serves, contains scenes focusing on Allen, Gaddes, Dilandau, Van, Millerna, Eries, Celena, and probably Dryden and Hitomi, and there might have been some omniscient moments as well, because I do that. Too lazy to reread it now. ;-)
7.) Are you drawn to a certain type of character as narrator?
*looks at list* Um, evil, highly intelligent, or combatically powerful characters? *blinks*
I think I'm drawn to certain types of characters period, whether or not I'm considering narrators--characters who are evil, conflicted, amoral, brilliant, strange, or just plain interesting. I'm more interested in writing about Draco than Ron, and thus would be more interesting in writing from Draco than Ron. But it is very rare that I'll find a character that I'll avoid outright or not find some interesting point about.
I tend not think of the "impartial observer" type of narrator--somehow it just seems less interesting to me to have had, say, Minerva McGonagall or Symus Avery narrating the Tom/Alastor story instead of Tom and Alastor themselves. (Of course, this could just be because Tom is bloody intense as a narrator, and Alastor is by turns fun and reflective.)
8.) Are there characters whose viewpoints you would never consider writing?
Um...characters I wouldn't write about in the first place? Not much of an answer, I suppose, especially since there very rarely are characters that I don't like. Characters I don't find quite interesting enough to focus on are more common--for example, I might write a fic with moderate Ron involvement, but I doubt he'd get viewpoint time, because I just don't find him that interesting. (Except when he's making snarky comments about accordions and arses, but that was a surprise for all involved.)
Trying to think of a character who I wouldn't POV from if the urge struck me. Some characters I'd have to be very careful with because of the potential for mishaps, since I don't understand them well, or they're rather complex, or they just have lots of things in their head--Dumbledore, for example, or Snape, or Peter, Atrus, Catherine... Some of those I have viewpointed--I was just very self-conscious doing so, although the pieces seemed to have been successful. I mean, I never took a whit of interest in the Dursleys until, as a result of a conversation with my roommate, Petunia popped into my head and starting wibbling about how her parents died, and next thing I knew I was staring at a little two-page 1st person angst attack.
9.) Are there characters you would only write as the narrator, but not from outside?
Again, I don't think so, because it's not a particularly conscious choice.
*thinks*
Actually, Catherine, for example, I have trouble writing from the outside. I've had her as narrator, but she seems strangely exempt from all my 3rd-person fics, and when she has appeared, I've been very wibbly about her. I think that's a quirk inherent in who Catherine is--externally, so often, she's simply a caring wife and mother, pleasant, with occasional moments of wisdom. Internally, and at moments in her past, and to Atrus (but I've never written Atrus extensively), she is a boundless genius, a wildly brilliant and spirited woman who breaks all the rules of creativity to make worlds out of her dreams. From the inside, she's fascinating and bloody fun to write; from the outside, she fades into the background, or is just a signature outline of her true beauty, a touch of red embroidery and feathered braids at the edge of a scene. She's interesting from the outside--I don't mean to give the impression that she's a total wallflower--but that's outshone by the dazzling beauty of her inner life, which is so often hidden, and by other characters who might be around who are more interesting from the ouside.
Yes, sepdet converted me. I am a Catherine fan. ;-)
10.) For which viewpoint character and which story did your conception of the character change the most over the course of writing the story?
Off the top of my head and looking at my recent work, I'd have to say Lucius, with that piece I've been dribbling into this journal, "Within These Pages...". Writing 3rd person limited for him wound up as an almost natural consequence of the form of the story, but it also gave me insights into the fellow I'd never really had before, especially concerning the insecurity he must have felt in the years after Voldemort's first fall. I'd previously tended to think of him as very one-dimensional, almost a caricature--very fun to write, because of his sex life, but not particularly interesting in his own right and a bit of a guilty pleasure, characterization-wise.
No first-person piece has ever deeply changed my conception of a character while I was writing--the bunny came, my conception changed then, and then I wrote. There was no process of discovery or evolution in writing Quirrell or Petunia because the pieces were so bloody short. There's only been a tiny bit of discovery with Tom and Alastor in their piece, because so much I already knew before I started writing or, in Alastor's case, don't yet know. The boy's being a bit of a mystery in many ways, although I don't particularly want him to be. Whereas Tom came to my mind not entirely simple, character-wise, but very clear.
But if one can count pieces which are mostly 3rd person and not particularly focused on one character, then I'd have to say the brothers in the dark Myst vignettes (a series of seven interconnected short stories with, unfortunately, no official or graceful group title). Both of them, but especially Achenar, changed and evolved radically over the course of the stories, as I spiraled deeper and deeper into their psyches. In my current mental ranking of my work, the DMVs rank as the beginning of "mature," and some of the stuff after them doesn't even count as such--I'm obscenely proud of them. Honorable mention, to continue in the vein of fic you don't know, would have to go to Tamra in The Book of Narayan, who evolved from simple love interest to a woman who, while not particularly complex, was still terribly real to me, and has been ever since. However, I'm getting rather tangential now, especially seeing as during the turning point in Tamra's story, the time of greatest stress, I focused more on her boyfriend, and watched her from the outside. After that--and before that, but she was a weaker character then--I got closer to her.
*pants* Gad, that was a huge post. Feel free to fall over, although I would prefer that you discuss. ;-)
OTP
McTabby tempted me to attempt to list my One True Pairing. This is a delicate venture, as it first requires me to say that there is indeed only one pairing which I firmly believe in with relation to canon. I don't often actively seek it out because, even though I do like it, I don't find it as interesting as some others, precisely because it's practically canon in my mind. Yes, I'm talking about Sirius/Remus.
Oh, attack of my slash bent when it actually comes to shipping. I can appreciate het pairings, but my creative interest is almost exclusively on the slash side. Don't ask me why, it just is.
But, for your interest, to list, in no particular order, pairings that I love, adore, etcetera, but don't have the same near-canonical attitude towards that I do with Sirius/Remus, any of which might compete for OTP status:
Tom/Alastor, Harry/Draco, Lucius/Harry, Snape/Harry, Tom/Lucius, Lucius/Gilderoy, Snape/Draco.
There are probably some I've forgotten.
I also have a thing for seemingly random pairings involving Weasleys, mainly for the sake of the Weasleys (but I don't do Weasleycest, except for moments of secondary twinnage)--Bill/Sirius/Remus, Bill/Draco, Snape/Charlie, Harry-and/or-Draco/Ron, Percy/assorted evil dominant types (Tom, Lucius, Snape), Cho/Ginny, HogwartsStudent!Arthur/HogwartsStudent!Hooch, etcetera--but I haven't settled upon anything resembling a OTWP. Oh, and Fred and George are so pretending one's gay and one's straight so as to share Lee and Angelina and not tell them, and Lee and Angelina so know but are not telling them.
The point of that paragraph? Redheads are sexy.
The writing survey
For the sake of my sanity, I'm going to keep this solely within my current fandom (HP) and the one fandom in which I've had extensive recognition (Myst), and keep my relatively shoddy anime-fandom work and my rather old original work out of it, because I don't think anything would particularly make this list. None of my HP work may make it either, as most of it's new, fragmentary, or very short.
Best story I think I've written: Although the bunny firmly attatched to my rear wants me to say "Within These Pages...," I think I'm going to have to go for the second dark Myst vignette, "Stoneship: Salt In the Wound," since the other is so new and not even complete. I'm only partially making my own judgement here--I'm never in a state to judge my own stories so absolutely. The thing burst out of my practically fully-formed, and had me shaking in my seat as I wrote it, and its effect on my readlings seems to have been extraordinary. I'm still very fond of it, in a detatched sort of way--I've reread it so often and remember so little of what I did to write it that it seems almost like somebody else's work, and it's never quite fit into the sequence of the DMVs.
Most underrated story of mine: Probably the last of the DMVs, "Whiterock: For the Love of Spring." I did post most of the later DMVs in a terrible rush, and the seventh was usurped by our boards changing software, but I still feel like most people didn't like it quite as much as I did. Some people got it, some people didn't, and lots of people never said anything.
Most overrated story of mine: Myst: The Book of Narayan. Rambling, flirting with breaking canon, sometimes immature, sometimes melodramatic, never quite finished, but beloved by the masses (okay, small piles) of MystCommunity. Not to say I still can't see its beauty--its greatest strength is as an exploration of Narayani culture and Tamra's character, and a brief and immaturely characterized slice of the brothers during their teens (and that part did spark the DMVs, which is the only long work of mine I've managed to retain any respect for), and as I still love those things there's hope for revision and completion.
Story of mine that best demonstrates that I've grown as a writer: Oy. So many of my pieces are so bloody short there's little growth whatsoever. Maybe my as-yet-untitled Tom/Alastor piece, which is green and growing and parts of it still stun me; maybe the DMVs as a whole, as they do encompass such a range of my growth between the Book of Narayan and my current tendency for short, impressionistic pieces.
Favorite story: Either "Within These Pages...," although that may be the bunny speaking again, or the third of the DMVs, "Mechanical: Vengeance." It was intense and frightening and hallucinatory to write, spanning a huge amount of creative time for its size (months for eighteen pages), contained some of the greatest leaps in characterization that I've ever made, and words and images from it still haunt me. It's always been my favorite of the DMVs, despite the major structual problems, because of the sheer power all its scenes still hold within me. And I also have an intense fondness for two fics as yet unposted, "Slither," a ten-year-old!Tom piece that just needs some going over, and "The Philosopher's Song," a Myst story which I've yet even to finish due to not finding the time to reread the Book of Ti'ana to research such salient points as who the hell is Suahrnir anyway?
Least favorite story: The last one I revised, of course--which in this case would be Go East, a Quirrell short that I just submitted to FictionAlley. Oh, and I'm still constantly convinced that the first DMV, "Everdunes: The Prophecy," sucks.
The PoV survey
Ah, this has come at a fortuitous time. I've only just started considering viewpoint in my own work, as I've only just started--quite unconsciously at first--experimenting with it on a regular basis.
This'll probably focus on my Harry Potter work, as my original work is outdated and minimal, my Myst work--or rather, the fandom--is probably nothing any of you know, and my work in other fandoms is either negligable or uninteresting viewpoint-wise. Plus the Harry Potter stuff, what of it I've posted, is about the only thing anybody who still reads my journal knows of.
1.) From whose POV have you written? Or, if there are too many to name, who have written most recently/famously/frequently?
In Harry Potter: Tom Riddle (1st person present and 3rd person limited past, in two different fics; the latter was when he was 10), 16-year-old Alastor Moody (1st person present), Quirrell (1st person present), Peter Pettigrew (3rd person limited past), Petunia Dursley (1st person present), Narcissa Malfoy (3rd person limited past), and Lucius Malfoy (3rd person limited past).
In Myst: Achenar (3rd person limited past), Suahrnir (3rd person limited past), Catherine (1st person present), and Atrus (1st person past and present--think journals). Also a short Escaflowne piece: Allen Schezar (3rd person limited present, and sometimes very detached). This must have been my first positive-resulted dabbling in viewpoints other than my default (which isn't character-focused), because this stuff predates the Potterfic.
I'm not going to list my work in other fandoms because it's all been in my own default narrative style, which is pretty close to third-person omniscient, so I'll get to that in number 5.
2.) How do you generally choose the viewpoint character(s) for a story?
It's usually either obvious or intuitive. I've been writing a long of character-focused one-shots recently, little two-page things caused by some character or another invading my brain for a while (Peter, Quirrell, Petunia, 10-year-old Tom); the character choice for those is obvious. The person and the tense are whatever happens, however the words appear in my mind; I've yet had to make a conscious choice in that vein with those.
Another fic I'm writing, a slash story concerning Tom Riddle and Alastor Moody during their sixth year at Hogwarts, is all in first-person present but alternates between narrators. That happened because it started with a cookie (which came of Tom invading my brain in first-person present), and then, after that, I starting hearing Moody's narration as well, so I did the obvious and decided to switch off.
Two fics I've started recently (one growing towards being a longish one-shot, the other a cookie with delusions of granduer) quite independently wound up with Malfoys as 3rd person limited. The first seemed obvious; Lucius is the center of the story, although Diary!Tom plays a major role, and having him the viewpoint allows me to simultaneously delve into his thoughts--and he's turning out to be a lot more wibbly than he appears, which has been fun--and watch Tom, unpredictable, powerful little thing that he is, from the outside. The other was the Lucius/Gilderoy cookie, which wound up being from Narcissa's viewpoint, which was spontaneous but quite entertaining. If that ever does grow into full ficness, I'll probably wind up switching between her, Lucius, and Gildie in 3rd person limited. That should be fun--seeing how each of them affects the styles of their respective sections, because they're quite different characters.
3.) First person or third person: do you have a preference? Is one easier than the other?
Preference? No. They both have their uses. I find that first is easier and more effective for shorter, intense, character-focused stuff, while third works for longer, more complex stories, with many characters or much plot. I don't think I've ever [successfully] written something with either a 1st person or a 3rd person limited [to one character] viewpoint that involved more than two characters, except for the Lucius/Gilderoy cookie, and that was only two pages and would start changing between 3rd person viewpoints if it got any longer.
4.) How do you decide which person to use in a particular story?
As in 2--focus or effect.
5.) Have you ever written second-person? Third omniscient? A story with no real viewpoint character, just an impartial eye?
Second-person: Not that I can remember. I'll probably try it someday; maybe I'll succeed, maybe not.
Third omniscient: Constantly. Until recently, at least, something which I interpret as a close cousin of third omniscient was my default narrative style, and I rarely experimented. Third person, past, constantly aware of everything that's going on both in the scene and in people's heads. Sometimes in one scene I'd limit myself to one character; sometimes I'd relay the thoughts of multiple characters in the text; sometimes I'd get very detatched. At the time, this style seemed seamless, and I'd never given much thought to PoV. When I talk about it, it sounds disjointed, and I wonder if I'd be bothered by it if I read carefully over earlier works (I'm thinking particularly of my longer Myst and Escaflowne pieces and my novel) with PoV in mind. Somehow, though, I suspect I mostly wouldn't be. Of course, I wrote it--I can realize that, even though I may have been omitting the thoughts of a character or two at any point in time, I still knew what they were. (In some of my more recent pieces, that has not been the case. The only parts of Tom's thoughts in "Within These Pages..." that I know of are the parts Lucius can observe or infer. It's a strange feeling, to somebody used to a third omniscient awareness of her scene, to write that way, but it's been working.) Somebody else might not know that, and thus it would appear that I was bouncing between third limited and third omniscient, and sometimes even third impartial.
Impartial eye: Again, not that I can remember. Sometimes moments of omniscient come close to it--when I decide to pull back the focus, as it were, particularly in moments after great stress. There was also an Escaflowne story that was half impartial and half inside the head of one of the characters. Telepathic impartial eye, maybe? Even the flashbacks seemed rather distant.
6.) What's the largest number of viewpoints you've ever used in a story?
That would probably have been The Scorpion in the Mirror, a tormented slashy smutty Escaflowne epic which I may well never complete, but which, if memory serves, contains scenes focusing on Allen, Gaddes, Dilandau, Van, Millerna, Eries, Celena, and probably Dryden and Hitomi, and there might have been some omniscient moments as well, because I do that. Too lazy to reread it now. ;-)
7.) Are you drawn to a certain type of character as narrator?
*looks at list* Um, evil, highly intelligent, or combatically powerful characters? *blinks*
I think I'm drawn to certain types of characters period, whether or not I'm considering narrators--characters who are evil, conflicted, amoral, brilliant, strange, or just plain interesting. I'm more interested in writing about Draco than Ron, and thus would be more interesting in writing from Draco than Ron. But it is very rare that I'll find a character that I'll avoid outright or not find some interesting point about.
I tend not think of the "impartial observer" type of narrator--somehow it just seems less interesting to me to have had, say, Minerva McGonagall or Symus Avery narrating the Tom/Alastor story instead of Tom and Alastor themselves. (Of course, this could just be because Tom is bloody intense as a narrator, and Alastor is by turns fun and reflective.)
8.) Are there characters whose viewpoints you would never consider writing?
Um...characters I wouldn't write about in the first place? Not much of an answer, I suppose, especially since there very rarely are characters that I don't like. Characters I don't find quite interesting enough to focus on are more common--for example, I might write a fic with moderate Ron involvement, but I doubt he'd get viewpoint time, because I just don't find him that interesting. (Except when he's making snarky comments about accordions and arses, but that was a surprise for all involved.)
Trying to think of a character who I wouldn't POV from if the urge struck me. Some characters I'd have to be very careful with because of the potential for mishaps, since I don't understand them well, or they're rather complex, or they just have lots of things in their head--Dumbledore, for example, or Snape, or Peter, Atrus, Catherine... Some of those I have viewpointed--I was just very self-conscious doing so, although the pieces seemed to have been successful. I mean, I never took a whit of interest in the Dursleys until, as a result of a conversation with my roommate, Petunia popped into my head and starting wibbling about how her parents died, and next thing I knew I was staring at a little two-page 1st person angst attack.
9.) Are there characters you would only write as the narrator, but not from outside?
Again, I don't think so, because it's not a particularly conscious choice.
*thinks*
Actually, Catherine, for example, I have trouble writing from the outside. I've had her as narrator, but she seems strangely exempt from all my 3rd-person fics, and when she has appeared, I've been very wibbly about her. I think that's a quirk inherent in who Catherine is--externally, so often, she's simply a caring wife and mother, pleasant, with occasional moments of wisdom. Internally, and at moments in her past, and to Atrus (but I've never written Atrus extensively), she is a boundless genius, a wildly brilliant and spirited woman who breaks all the rules of creativity to make worlds out of her dreams. From the inside, she's fascinating and bloody fun to write; from the outside, she fades into the background, or is just a signature outline of her true beauty, a touch of red embroidery and feathered braids at the edge of a scene. She's interesting from the outside--I don't mean to give the impression that she's a total wallflower--but that's outshone by the dazzling beauty of her inner life, which is so often hidden, and by other characters who might be around who are more interesting from the ouside.
Yes, sepdet converted me. I am a Catherine fan. ;-)
10.) For which viewpoint character and which story did your conception of the character change the most over the course of writing the story?
Off the top of my head and looking at my recent work, I'd have to say Lucius, with that piece I've been dribbling into this journal, "Within These Pages...". Writing 3rd person limited for him wound up as an almost natural consequence of the form of the story, but it also gave me insights into the fellow I'd never really had before, especially concerning the insecurity he must have felt in the years after Voldemort's first fall. I'd previously tended to think of him as very one-dimensional, almost a caricature--very fun to write, because of his sex life, but not particularly interesting in his own right and a bit of a guilty pleasure, characterization-wise.
No first-person piece has ever deeply changed my conception of a character while I was writing--the bunny came, my conception changed then, and then I wrote. There was no process of discovery or evolution in writing Quirrell or Petunia because the pieces were so bloody short. There's only been a tiny bit of discovery with Tom and Alastor in their piece, because so much I already knew before I started writing or, in Alastor's case, don't yet know. The boy's being a bit of a mystery in many ways, although I don't particularly want him to be. Whereas Tom came to my mind not entirely simple, character-wise, but very clear.
But if one can count pieces which are mostly 3rd person and not particularly focused on one character, then I'd have to say the brothers in the dark Myst vignettes (a series of seven interconnected short stories with, unfortunately, no official or graceful group title). Both of them, but especially Achenar, changed and evolved radically over the course of the stories, as I spiraled deeper and deeper into their psyches. In my current mental ranking of my work, the DMVs rank as the beginning of "mature," and some of the stuff after them doesn't even count as such--I'm obscenely proud of them. Honorable mention, to continue in the vein of fic you don't know, would have to go to Tamra in The Book of Narayan, who evolved from simple love interest to a woman who, while not particularly complex, was still terribly real to me, and has been ever since. However, I'm getting rather tangential now, especially seeing as during the turning point in Tamra's story, the time of greatest stress, I focused more on her boyfriend, and watched her from the outside. After that--and before that, but she was a weaker character then--I got closer to her.
*pants* Gad, that was a huge post. Feel free to fall over, although I would prefer that you discuss. ;-)